We haven't quite got Gears of War 4 yet, but that hasn't stopped developer The Coalition thinking about Gears 5 and beyond.

During an interview with Digital Spy, The Coalition Studio Head Rod Ferguson revealed that now Microsoft owns the Gears of War franchise, it has allowed them to develop Gears 4 in a different way.

"One of the things that's nice about Microsoft's investment is that we know, unless this does horribly, we're probably going to do another one," explained Ferguson.

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"That's made it easier to design moving forward. In the past, when we were doing Gears 1, Gears 2 and Gears 3, there was a lot of doubt, we didn't know whether there would be another one, so we just had to get everything in right now.

"Here, we're able to look at it, recognise a great idea that doesn't quite fit right now, but it'll fit in the next one. It's made it a lot easier."

So that means that Gears of War 5 is pretty much an inevitability.

We also asked Ferguson whether they ever thought about ditching any of the game's classic weapons, such as the chainsaw/machine gun combo Lancer.

"Not the Lancer," he said. "The Lancer is just a little bit too core for us. We've talked about pretty much all the weapons and things about what should stay and what should go.

"Take the Ink Grenade for example. The Ink Grenade is out of Gears 4 because of the fiction around the game. But if for some reason we thought the Ink Grenade was critical for the future, we could find a way to bring it back. We can think, 'Well it's not for this one, but who knows what the feature will allow us to do with our fiction and where we're taking the story'."